>>2158975Forestry guy here. Yeah it happens that people go missing under suspicious circumstances but Paulides is a grifter and exaggerates the details. I can tell you for a fact there are missing persons cases I have witnessed that were definitely foul play but there simply wasn't enough for the sheriff or our law enforcement guy to actually investigate or make concrete conclusions. These cases were never reported in the news because the media is incompetent and doesn't actually look for local stories. There were far more missing persons reports that were simply a case of the forest being huge, dense, and the person who got lost being far away from the trail. Lots of people go missing in the woods that part is true, the amount that are suspicious are small in comparison but not nonexistent.
Paulides is an Alex Jones-tier conman who writes about the handful of unexplained cases as if they are undeniably paranormal even if he only says it implicitly and hell he's been wrong multiple times. There was a lady that was found just two years ago who had gone missing and Paulides had said it was a classic "411 case", turns out she was 2 miles away from the trail and got turned around in really dense brush and died. Did Paulides care? Did he ever make a public apology for cashing in on that family's grief? No, he just acted like he had never heard of it.
As for if anything paranormal has ever happened in the woods of North America well they're huge. I'm sure somewhere in North America there has been a legitimately unexplainable disappearance that maybe was due to something we don't understand. I've never seen it, no one I've ever worked with has seen it, doesn't mean it's completely impossible. Met a lot of guys who believe in bigfoot however, and I kinda think that one might be true.
